Statement by Tom DeWeese Freedom Action National Conference Valley Forge, PA August 14, 2010

The revolution of 1776 was not just an exercise by armed men seeking to overthrow their current government – as had been done so many times throughout history.

It wasn’t a desperate attempt to replace a bad king with a new one – backed by the usual hope that this time, this one would finally turn a kind, benevolent ear toward the pleas of the people.

Such revolutions had been fought for centuries. Up to 1776 none of them had resulted in the desired goals.

Always the newly installed despot learned quickly how to plunder the people, gain power and riches for themselves, while holding out the carrot – the promise of a better day.

Not until 1776 did a few scholarly men in a rural, backward, isolated land figure it out. They studied every possible style of government. They noted the pitfalls, the dangers, the traps that lead to tyranny. And they noted this fact: Freedom doesn’t just happen. It must first be understood. And then it must be planned, implemented and protected.

Today, based on that first American Revolution, every one of us talks about how we support the

principles of freedom. But what are those principles of freedom? And were did they come from?

The Principles of Freedom

It is little understood that our founding fathers didn’t just come up with an idea and start to sell it as a principle—the way Obama and the in crowd do today.

First of all, we must understand that principles are not legislated or invented. A principle exists and you are subject to it, whether or not you know it. Eventually that principle is discovered.

For example, for centuries men were ignorant of the laws of physics but they were subject to them nonetheless. Man couldn’t fly or fill two objects in the same space, no matter how hard he tried because the laws (or principles) of physics are fact, whether known or unknown.

The same is true with the principles of freedom. The basic principles of freedom are consistent with man’s nature and that’s why they work. When the principles of freedom are recognized and adhered to, there is prosperity, justice and happiness. When the principles have been ignored or rejected, men have suffered poverty, stagnation and political tyranny. (more…)

New Chemical Element Discovered

Pelosium:

A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named Pelosium. Pelosium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. (more…)

By Matt Cover, CNS News Staff Writer

(CNSNews.com) – According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government helped pay the home air conditioning bills for more than 11,000 dead people, 1,100 federal employees, and 725 convicts in fiscal year 2009.

The payments were made by a $5 billion program known as the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). LIHEAP is designed to provide federal assistance, administered by the states, to help people pay the energy bills to heat their homes in the winter and cool them in the summer. The funds are disbursed by the Department of Health and Human Services and are distributed based on a formula that takes into account a state’s weather and the size of its low-income population. (more…)

There’s Overweight, and Then There’s “Overweight”

We’ve long held that using the “Body Mass Index” (BMI) as a tool for measuring obesity is wrongheaded. BMI is a simplistic measure that only combines height and weight—ignoring muscle mass—which leads to erroneous classifications. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cast doubt on its usefulness. So it wasn’t surprising to read yesterday that the British National Health Service (NHS), which measures schoolchildren’s BMI and sends “warning letters” to parents of supposedly “overweight” kids, has made a number of big fat screw-ups. (more…)

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work…we have just as much unemployment as when we started…and an enormous debt to boot!” It was a decade of disaster and the man who spoke these words was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury. The date was May 9, 1939.

By then the Roosevelt administration had been in office eight years and Morgenthau was addressing his fellow Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee. In Congress and in the White House today our nation’s leaders are repeating the same errors as their predecessors in the midst of the Great Depression.

Reflecting on the errors of the 1930s, Chris Edwards, Director of Tax Policy at the Cato Institute, in September 2005 wrote, “Many people think that we need a big government to prevent, or to reverse, recessions. But the 1930s illustrate that activist policies increase, not decrease economic instability.” (more…)